Paid Acquisition on mobile has become an increasingly competitive landscape. Similar to days past on web where real time bidding exchanges slowly drove up the cost of advertising; casino, RPG and Batte-card trading games with very high ARPU (Average Revenue per User) have made buying users costly.

If you're buying users to supplement the launch of your game start small with Facebook Mobile Ads. You can use Facebook to acquire users based on location, age, gender, likes, and more. You can target users on devices of your choosing and embed the ads directly in a users news feed.

As you scale your ad spends you should look to spend on audiences that produce an LTV (Life time value) greater than the cost to acquire them. We use the standard equation:

CAC < ARPU (Cost to acquire customer is less than Average Revenue per User)

Move to mobile networks next in an effort to capture larger volumes of users with the device types/os/and locations that convert best.

Here are some great ad networks for iOS/Android:

Playhaven: A FREE self serve dashboard to cross promote other games, serve interstitial advertisements, or pop-up announcements to message your users with updates, rate me dialogs, email campaigns and more. Playhaven's core functionality is based on "Placements" that let you generate pre-determined hooks in your game's source code at strategic content breaks in your game.

Heyzap: Heyzap started as a nifty leaderboard/achievements layer packaged conveniently in one SDK. They now have some groundbreaking ad units that help increase publisher eCPM's by increasing user engagement. Heyzaps's core ad functionality is based on "Tags" that let you generate pre-determined hooks in your game's source code at strategic content breaks in your game.

Chartboost: Another toolset available to developers with a self serve dashboard that lets you cross promote your games, serve interstitial advertisements and includes a direct deals marketplace where you can publicly list your games and sell ad inventory direct to other developers. Chartboost is very light weight and one of the fastest interstitial serving platforms.

Tapjoy is the gold standard for incentivized offer walls. Instead of serving interstitial advertisements during content breaks Tapjoy ties directly into your game's economy as a set of monetizable actions users can perform in exchange for in game currency. Here's a look at what kind of impact Tapjoy can have on an audience that may never convert into a paying user but will gladly trade actions for in game currency.

Kiip monetizes success moments in your game by rewarding users with free product samples, gift cards, mp3 downloads, and more from top brands. When a user claims rewards you receive payouts in the form of revenue per completed action.

Ad Colony is a leader in the incentivized video space. Typically tied to an in game soft currency, a user can elect to watch a video in exchange for a consumable currency in your game's economy.

Flurry App Circle Flurry got its start and is still a prominent player in the analytics space but has proved its merit as a provider of in game advertising. Their ad formats include interstitial advertisements and non-incentivized video during content breaks. Typically found in free to play games, flurry ad units help developers monetize high DAU games.Mopub was recently acquired by Twitter but still offers one of the best Ad mediation products on mobile. Ad mediation services act as a mediator between several networks server side. Mopub's self serve dashboard allows you to manage your inventory and swap multiple ad networks in and out depending on their overall payout performance.

Mopub was recently acquired by Twitter but still offers one of the best Ad mediation products on mobile. Ad mediation services act as a mediator between several networks server side. Mopub's self serve dashboard allows you to manage your inventory and swap multiple ad networks in and out depending on their overall payout performance.

Airpush is the gold standard for android advertising. With a grouping of unique ad formats their deep integration with the android operating system allow you to monetize your app not only within the game itself but also through native push and more.

Remember that users acquired from paid acquisition sources will behave differently from organic installs.